While WW1 ended nearly a century ago, its scars can still be found across Northern France and Belgium. Zone Rouge (French for Red Zone) is perhaps the ultimate example of this.
At the end of the war in 1918, the French government isolated the areas in red above and forbade activities such as forestry, farming and even the building of houses from being performed inside them.
In total the non-contiguous areas took up 1,200 sq km (460 sq mi) (roughly the size of New York City).
The primary reason the areas were declared no-go zones was that they had seen some of the worst fighting during the war, particularly during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. The areas were environmentally devastated and contained large numbers of unexploded ordnance along with human and animal remains that further contaminated the environment.
The Battle of Verdun lasted 303 days and was one of the longest and bloodiest in human history with somewhere between 700,000 and 1,250,000 casualties in total. It also resulted in the destruction of villages, 6 of which have never been rebuilt.
- Beaumont-en-Verdunois
- Bezonvaux
- Cumières-le-Mort-Homme
- Fleury-devant-Douaumont
- Haumont-près-Samogneux
- Louvemont-Côte-du-Poivre
Over the last century work has been done to clean up Zone Rouge and today the no-go areas have shrunk to 168 sq KM (65 sq mi) (about twice the size of Manhattan).
However, cleaning up the areas doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re safe. Nor that areas that were not included in the original Zone Rouge are without danger. The Iron harvest, which uncovers unexploded ordnance, barbed wire, shrapnel, bullets and congruent trench supports, still occurs every year across North France and Belgium.
Since the end of the war, at least 900 people have been killed by unexploded WW1 ordnance across France and Belgium, with most recent deaths as late as 1998. Meaning that the war was still claiming victims 80 years after the cease-fire went into effect.
A blog post really can’t do this topic much justice so I highly recommend learning more from the following books:
- The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
- Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War
- A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918
- Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918
- Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
We welcome any comments you have on this post below:
Castor says
I’ve been living 20 years near the river Somme and I can tell that this map is only accurate for the 10 years following the end of the war. After a superficial cleanup, the lands have quickly been reused, especially in northern France where it was vital to grow cereals again. Besides, a quick look here : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aire_urbaine_de_Douai-Lens (in French)
will show you that the area between Arras and Lille is one of the most dense in France with ca. 800 inhabitants/km².
farawayplace says
One of my good friends in Korea was playing near a small roadside fire with two of her friends. This would have been late 70’s. An unexploded mine got hot enough to explode, and one of the girls lost part of her face. My friend has scars on her wrists, and still has PTSD whenever she hears a boom… totally freezing like a zombie for several seconds.
Dima says
A few photos: http://www.yaplakal.com/forum2/topic1126948.html (in Russian)
Richard says
Visit the hills above Verdun. It smells like a cemetery. There is a big building at Douaumont called the Ossuary – the “bone house”. Before the war, this was a string of hills 20 miles long and 2 miles wide covered with a chestnut forest. At the end of the war, the entire string of hills was one big mudhole. More than 60 million artillery rounds had been fired into it. The forest has been replanted but it is still dangerous up there and you can still see the wire and stakes. We have Civil War battlefields in the US, I was in Gettysburg last spring. At Verdun, more people died in 9 months on one battlefield than in the entire US Civil War. I think that WW1 battlefields are stark places.
Tim says
In his book Unsung Heroes, Erik Durschmied gives a fascinating account of how a German Corporal got inside the fortress there and took it for the German forces before getting drunk, making his excuses and leaving…
Tim says
I lived in Compiegne in 1990 and was told not to wander too far into the forests. More recently I returned with a school party and went to ‘La Caverne du Dragon’ on the Chemin des Dames, near Laon. There I was told that even now munitions are regularly unearthed and are taken off for controlled explosion as they are often full of mercury, and even now bodies are found in denser woodland (usually by dogs). The woodlands around Vimy Ridge are testament to the bombardment the area suffered; a very humbling place.
Drew Fisher says
On a recent tour of the WW I battlefields and cemeteries in Flanders we were taken to a farmer friend of our guide whose family has been farming the same land near Langemark for over six hundred years. He showed us his table in one of his barns on which he places his weekly finds from his fields. The Iron Harvest is something that goes on constantly. Each week farmers in Belgium place the shells, grenades, bones, etc. on the roadside for the Army to do their pickup. On his table that week he had several dozen items–mostly grenades (some still live!) But the most shocking item was a woman’s heeled silk shoe with the foot and tibia bones still in it! Yes, one hundred years later there are tons of WWI paraphernalia being found in the grounds of the old battlefields!
Andrew Folgmann says
Do you know the title, or authors name , he wrote a book in three parts, one about demining in France, one about Vietnamese soldiers, and a third part about the left over German debris left in Stalingard. I believe it has a one word title , and was written in the 1990’s. Thank You for any help with this.
DougR says
Sounds like: Aftermath : the remnants of war / Donovan Webster. c1996. ISBN 067975153X
Summary: In riveting and revelatory detail, Aftermath documents the ways in which wars have transformed the terrain of the battlefield into landscapes of memory and enduring terror: in France, where millions of acres of farmland are cordoned off to all but a corps of demolition experts responsible for the undetonated bombs and mines of World War I that are now rising up in fields, gardens, and backyards; in a sixty-square-mile area outside Stalingrad that was a cauldron of destruction in 1941 and is today an endless field of bones; in the Nevada deserts, where America waged a hidden nuclear war against itself in the 1950’s, the results of which are only now becoming apparent; in Vietnam, where a nation’s effort to remove the physical detritus of war has created psychological and genetic devastation; in Kuwait, where terrifyingly sophisticated warfare was followed by the Sisyphean task of making an uninhabitable desert capable of sustaining life. Aftermath excavates our century’s darkest history, revealing that the destruction of the past remains deeply, inextricably embedded in the present.
Scandalous_Toad says
The book is named “Aftermath: The Remnants of War” by Donovan Webster.
RoHa says
“Ended nearly a century ago “
More than a century, you mean.